Category Archives: Poetry

We have celebrating poetry in the library and in the school during the month of April. Today was a very special day: Poem in your pocket day. Everyone was invited to put a poem in their pocket to share with someone else. Today classes shared their poems with each other, their buddy classes and more.

Some classes also went to David Grey Park to share their poems there. Click here to see a great video on Ms. Shuster’s blog about our day.

We have lots of great poetry books in the library. Come and check one out any time. Here are a few of the new books we have that celebrate the great art of poetry.

One of the sessions I attended at the IRA (International Reading Association) Conference a couple of weeks ago was called “The Art of Teaching Reading”. It was presented by Tim Rasinksi, a professor of literacy education at Kent State University. He shared the importance of ensuring our students enjoy reading through song, poetry and more.

One of the poems he shared reminded me that I “read because it’s beautiful”.

Read It Because It’s Beautiful
by Karen Morrow Durica

Somehow a life without poetry seems…
Dismal
Empty
Flat—
Not much.

So each day in my classroom I read…
Sonnets
Haikus
Free verse—
And such.

An observer sat in my room one day…
Noted poem’s title
Evaluated delivery
Recorded “lesson” sequence—
Said dryly: “It seems

There’s no connection curricular-wise…
No anticipatory set
No vocabulary drill
No comprehension query—
Do they know what it means?”

I could have contrived a defense or two, but…
Spirits flowed with peaceful joy
Honesty prevailed
Simple truth explained—
“I read it because it’s beautiful,” I said.

She didn’t quite frown but recalled all the same, “We’ve…
Standards to meet
Timelines to keep
Pages to cover—
Important content to be read.”

I looked from her to my students’ gaze; they…
Had relished the words
Danced with the rhythm
Mused with the meaning—
Were richer in spirit than when we began.

I read it because it was beautiful. And beauty is…
Never superfluous
Never irrelevant
Always needed—
Always in my “lesson” plan.

April is poetry month and we’ve been having lots of fun with poetry in the library this past week. Students have been reading poetry and talking about what they notice.

Divisions 5 and 16 read many different poetry books and marked their favourites with a post it. They then passed the book to a friend so they could read the poems they chose and maybe find one or two of their own. Here are some of the things they noticed about the poems they read.

We also explored a great poetry web site. Poetryfpundation.org has some great resources including videos of poems. We watched some in the library.My favourite was “Daffodils” by William Wordsworth

After divisions 7 and 8 listened to this poem with their ears and their hearts, we wrote our own poems using what we had heard and what words or phrases were most powerful for us. Here are our poems: